Energy is the line on the P&L that nobody owns and everybody pays for.
In this episode, Chris sits down with Diego Vega, Founder and CEO of Rye Energy, and is later joined by Rory, Head of Operations and ex-chef, to crack open a category most operators have been forced to ignore.
Why this conversation matters
Hospitality consumes three to four times more electricity per square foot than the average business. A coffee shop, per square foot, burns more energy than a petrol station. And yet, energy procurement remains one of the most opaque, broker-led, deliberately complex purchases an operator makes.
Diego compares it to where payments sat five years ago, before Dojo and the new wave of providers pulled back the curtain. Rye is doing the same for multi-utilities.
What Rye actually does
Rye is a platform that unifies data and contract terms across electricity, gas, water (and soon waste) for multi-site operators. Three core jobs: procurement, real-time monitoring via meter data, and bill validation.
It benchmarks your sites against each other (Manchester vs Leeds vs London) and against sector peers, so you finally know what good looks like.
The 40% problem
Only 40% of your energy bill is the actual commodity. The rest is non-commodity transmission costs, levies and fees financing the renewable transition.
Lock in the best unit rate you like; the hidden cost stack is where margins quietly disappear. The cheapest kilowatt hour is the one you don't use, and reducing usage compounds savings because it pulls down the non-commodity charges too.
The surprise finding from 100+ live sites
Diego went in expecting efficiency to be the headline win. It wasn't. The bigger unlock has been growth. Operators trying to open 5, 10, 17 sites a year keep getting stuck on single-phase to three-phase upgrades, undersized meters, and MEP plans that don't match the kitchen they're trying to run.
Nobody on the team owns this, and a £50k landlord capex contribution rarely covers it. Rye is quietly removing that drag on growth pipelines.
Rory on what operators get wrong
After eight years in energy and a previous life in kitchens, Rory has seen the patterns. The biggest culprits:
HVAC and extraction systems left running on poorly configured timers, sucking money overnight. Defrost cycles spiking load profiles at 3am for no operational reason. Sites moving in and forgetting to sort utilities until the supplier starts chasing debt.
The fix is process, not heroics. Rye builds an average load profile per site (half-hourly), overlays what good looks like, and quantifies the gap in pounds. Same shape, different scale. The well-run site becomes the playbook for the rest of the estate.
The macro picture nobody's planning for
Three major shocks in six years: Covid (demand-side), Ukraine, and now Iran (supply-side). Jet fuel reserves reportedly down to three weeks of supply heading into summer. Energy crises become food crises through fertiliser and transport costs. Wheat, rice and coffee feel it next. Diego's point: in the next 18 months, regulatory changes around half-hourly data access could cut costs by 40-50% for operators who know how to act on it. Most won't, because nobody on the team is watching.
When to act
If you're 6-12 months out from contract end, that's the window. Rye tracks the wholesale market up to a year ahead of your renewal and moves when the dip is right, rather than letting brokers run the clock down on you.
The commercial bit
Rye only charges once it starts saving you money. Book a call, get a demo, see where the gaps are before committing anything.
Find Rye
Website: https://rye.energy
Marketplace: https://www.techontoast.co.uk/marketplace
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